Margaret Mead Other research areas
What did Mead research other than Samoa?
What did Mead research other than Samoa?
In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology" Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether this information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification". In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. By this she meant that environment (i.e., family structure, socioeconomic status, exposure to language) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Lastly, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing, in his book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are indeed racial differences in intelligence.  In 1929 Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northern-most province of Papua New Guinea, travelling there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.  Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering, and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.  Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a U.S. Air Force military funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.  As an Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. CANNOTANSWER
Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed.
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and the 1970s.

She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College of Columbia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic. Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution. She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.

Birth, early family life, and education
Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Her father, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead, was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants. Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. That was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years. Her family moved frequently and so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania. Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926. Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith with which she had been formally acquainted, Christianity. In doing so, she found the rituals of the United States Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking. Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College.

Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, began studying with thr professor Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, and earned her master's degree in 1924. Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa. In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1929.

Personal life
Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict. However, Sapir's conservative stances about marriage and women's roles were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa, they separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while she was living in Samoa. There, on a beach, she later burned their correspondence.

Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement, she married her first husband (1923–1928), Luther Cressman, an American theology student who later became an anthropologist. Between 1925 and 1926, she was in Samoa from where on the return boat she met Reo Fortune, a New Zealander headed to Cambridge, England, to study psychology. They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist.

Mead's pediatrician was Benjamin Spock, whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand, rather than by a schedule. She readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her and remained his loving friend ever afterward. She kept his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed. 

Mead also had an exceptionally-close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson strongly implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual. Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual. In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with the anthropologist Rhoda Metraux with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter clearly express a romantic relationship.

Mead had two sisters and a brother, Elizabeth, Priscilla, and Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married the cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married the author Leo Rosten. Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig.

Career and later life

During World War II, Mead was executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits.  She was curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948. She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.

Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture. She served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950 and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with thr communications theorist Rudolf Modley in jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how "primitive." In the 1960s, Mead served as the Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences. She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976. She was a recognizable figure in academia and usually wore a distinctive cape and carried a walking stick.

Mead was a key participant in the Macy conferences on cybernetics and an editor of their proceedings. Mead's address to the inaugural conference of the American Society for Cybernetics was instrumental in the development of second-order cybernetics.

Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology.  In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol. 2: Voices of Women in American History.

She is credited with the term "semiotics" and made it a noun.

In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston.

In 1976, Mead was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham, Pennsylvania.

Work

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance:

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal.  It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.

Mead's findings suggested that the community ignores both boys and girls until they are about 15 or 16. Before then, children have no social standing within the community. Mead also found that marriage is regarded as a social and economic arrangement in which wealth, rank, and job skills of the husband and wife are taken into consideration.

In 1970, National Educational Television produced a documentary in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Mead's first expedition to New Guinea. Through the eyes of Mead on her final visit to the village of Peri, the film records how the role of the anthropologist has changed in the forty years since 1928.

In 1983, five years after Mead had died, New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged Mead's major findings about sexuality in Samoan society. Freeman's book was controversial in its turn: later in 1983, a special session of Mead's supporters in the American Anthropological Association (to which Freeman was not invited) declared it to be "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible and misleading."

In 1999, Freeman published another book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, including previously unavailable material. In his obituary in The New York Times, John Shaw stated that his thesis, though upsetting many, had by the time of his death generally gained widespread acceptance. Recent work has nonetheless challenged his critique. A frequent criticism of Freeman is that he regularly misrepresented Mead's research and views. In a 2009 evaluation of the debate, anthropologist Paul Shankman concluded:

There is now a large body of criticism of Freeman's work from a number of perspectives in which Mead, Samoa, and anthropology appear in a very different light than they do in Freeman's work. Indeed, the immense significance that Freeman gave his critique looks like 'much ado about nothing' to many of his critics.

While nurture-oriented anthropologists are more inclined to agree with Mead's conclusions, there are other non-anthropologists who take a nature-oriented approach following Freeman's lead, such as the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, the biologist Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, the science writer Matt Ridley, and the classicist Mary Lefkowitz. The philosopher Peter Singer has also criticized Mead in his book A Darwinian Left, where he states that "Freeman compiles a convincing case that Mead had misunderstood Samoan customs".

In 1996, the author Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public. Orans point out that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu, who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead, were equivocal for several reasons. Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu.   Orans points out that Mead's data support several different conclusions and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture. Orans went on to point out concerning Mead's work elsewhere that her own notes do not support her published conclusive claims. Evaluating Mead's work in Samoa from a positivist stance, Orans's assessment of the controversy was that Mead did not formulate her research agenda in scientific terms and that "her work may properly be damned with the harshest scientific criticism of all, that it is 'not even wrong'."

The Intercollegiate Review , published by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which promotes conservative thought on college campuses, listed the book as No. 1 on its The Fifty Worst Books of the Century list.

Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)
Another influential book by Mead was Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies. It became a major cornerstone of the feminist movement since it claimed that females are dominant in the Tchambuli (now spelled Chambri) Lake region of the Sepik basin of Papua New Guinea (in the western Pacific) without causing any special problems. The lack of male dominance may have been the result of the Australian administration's outlawing of warfare. According to contemporary research, males are dominant throughout Melanesia (although some believe that female witches have special powers). Others have argued that there is still much cultural variation throughout Melanesia, especially in the large island of New Guinea. Moreover, anthropologists often overlook the significance of networks of political influence among females. The formal male-dominated institutions typical of some areas of high population density were not, for example, present in the same way in Oksapmin, West Sepik Province, a more sparsely-populated area. Cultural patterns there were different from, say, Mount Hagen. They were closer to those described by Mead.

Mead stated that the Arapesh people, also in the Sepik, were pacifists, but she noted that they on occasion engage in warfare. Her observations about the sharing of garden plots among the Arapesh, the egalitarian emphasis in child rearing, and her documentation of predominantly peaceful relations among relatives are very different from the "big man" displays of dominance that were documented in more stratified New Guinea cultures, such as by Andrew Strathern. They are a different cultural pattern.

In brief, her comparative study revealed a full range of contrasting gender roles:
 "Among the Arapesh, both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war.
 "Among the Mundugumor, the opposite was true: both men and women were warlike in temperament.
 "And the Tchambuli were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones—the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America."

Deborah Gewertz (1981) studied the Chambri (called Tchambuli by Mead) in 1974–1975 and found no evidence of such gender roles. Gewertz states that as far back in history as there is evidence (1850s), Chambri men dominated the women, controlled their produce, and made all important political decisions. In later years, there has been a diligent search for societies in which women dominate men or for signs of such past societies, but none has been found (Bamberger 1974). Jessie Bernard criticised Mead's interpretations of her findings and argued that Mead was biased in her descriptions by using of subjective descriptions.  Bernard argues that Mead claimed the Mundugumor women were temperamentally identical to men, but her reports indicate that there were in fact sex differences; Mundugumor women hazed each other less than men hazed each other and made efforts to make themselves physically desirable to others, married women had fewer affairs than married men, women were not taught to use weapons, women were used less as hostages and Mundugumor men engaged in physical fights more often than women. In contrast, the Arapesh were also described as equal in temperament, but Bernard states that Mead's own writings indicate that men physically fought over women, yet women did not fight over men. The Arapesh also seemed to have some conception of sex differences in temperament, as they would sometimes describe a woman as acting like a particularly quarrelsome man. Bernard also questioned if the behaviour of men and women in those societies differed as much from Western behaviour as Mead claimed. Bernard argued that some of her descriptions could be equally descriptive of a Western context.

Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women.

Other research areas
In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology," Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether that information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification." In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. She meant that environment (family structure, socioeconomic status, and exposure to language, etc.) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Then, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are racial differences in intelligence.

In 1929, Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northernmost province of Papua New Guinea, and traveled there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography, and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard.  On Manus, she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.'

Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.

Mead worked for the RAND Corporation, a US Air Force military-funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.

As an Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.

Controversy
After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by the anthropologist Derek Freeman, who published a book arguing against many of Mead's conclusions in Coming of Age in Samoa.<ref>Derek Freeman (1983). Margaret Mead and Samoa. Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press. .</ref> Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman found that the Samoan islanders whom Mead had depicted in such utopian terms were intensely competitive and had murder and rape rates higher than those in the United States. Furthermore, the men were intensely sexually jealous, which contrasted sharply with Mead’s depiction of 'free love" among the Samoans.

Freeman's critique was met with a considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, but it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures. Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, but others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods. Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality, but Freeman found and interviewed one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having wilfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.

On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person and find instead that Mead based her conclusions on the sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work. Some anthropologists have however maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew.

In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger, Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.

A survey of 301 anthropology faculty in the United States in 2016 had two thirds agreeing with a statement that Mead "romanticizes the sexual freedom of Samoan adolescents" and half agreeing that it was ideologically motivated.

Legacy
In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

On January 19, 1979, US President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring her contributions that was sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:

In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Mead's name and picture.

The 2014 novel Euphoria by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Mead's love/marital relationships with fellow anthropologists Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson in New Guinea before World War II.

In addition, there are several schools named after Mead in the United States: a junior high school in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, an elementary school in Sammamish, Washington and another in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.

The US Postal Service issued a stamp of face value 32¢ on May 28, 1998 as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.

In the 1967 musical Hair, her name is given to a tranvestite "tourist" disturbing the show with the song "My Conviction."

Bibliography

Note: See also Margaret Mead: The Complete Bibliography 1925–1975, Joan Gordan, ed., The Hague: Mouton.

As a sole authorComing of Age in Samoa (1928)Growing Up In New Guinea (1930)The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932)Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935)And Keep Your Powder Dry: An Anthropologist Looks at America (1942)Male and Female (1949)New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation in Manus, 1928–1953 (1956)People and Places (1959; a book for young readers)Continuities in Cultural Evolution (1964)Culture and Commitment (1970)The Mountain Arapesh: Stream of events in Alitoa (1971)Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years (1972; autobiography)

As editor or coauthorBalinese Character: A Photographic Analysis, with Gregory Bateson, 1942, New York Academy of Sciences.
 Soviet Attitudes Toward Authority (1951)Cultural Patterns and Technical Change, editor (1953)Primitive Heritage: An Anthropological Anthology, edited with Nicholas Calas (1953)An Anthropologist at Work, editor (1959, reprinted 1966; a volume of Ruth Benedict's writings)The Study of Culture at a Distance, edited with Rhoda Metraux, 1953Themes in French Culture, with Rhoda Metraux, 1954The Wagon and the Star: A Study of American Community Initiative co-authored with Muriel Whitbeck Brown, 1966A Rap on Race, with James Baldwin, 1971A Way of Seeing, with Rhoda Metraux, 1975

See also

Tim Asch
Gregory Bateson
Ray Birdwhistell
Macy Conferences
Elsie Clews Parsons
Visual anthropology
Zora Neale Hurston
75½ Bedford St

References

Sources

Bateson, Mary Catherine. (1984) With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, New York: William Morrow. 

Caffey, Margaret M., and Patricia A. Francis, eds. (2006). To Cherish the Life of the World:  Selected Letters of Margaret Mead.  New York: Basic Books.
Caton, Hiram, ed. (1990) The Samoa Reader: Anthropologists Take Stock, University Press of America. 

Foerstel, Leonora, and Angela Gilliam, eds. (1992). Confronting the Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire and the South Pacific. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Freeman, Derek. (1983) Margaret Mead and Samoa, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Freeman, Derek. (1999) The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research, Boulder, CO: Westview Press. 

Holmes, Lowell D. (1987). Quest for the Real Samoa: the Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond. South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey.
Howard, Jane. (1984). Margaret Mead: A Life, New York: Simon and Schuster.
Keeley, Lawrence (1996). War Before Civilization: the Myth of the Peaceful Savage (Oxford University Press). 
Lapsley, Hilary. (1999). Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women. University of Massachusetts Press. 

Lutkehaus, Nancy C. (2008). Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  

 Mandler, Peter (2013). Return from the Natives: How Margaret Mead Won the Second World War and Lost the Cold War. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Mead, Margaret. 1977. The Future as Frame for the Present. Audio recording of a lecture delivered July 11, 1977.

Pinker, Steven A. (1997). How the Mind Works. 
Sandall, Roger. (2001) The Culture Cult: Designer Tribalism and Other Essays. 

Shore, Brad. (1982) Sala'ilua: A Samoan Mystery. New York: Columbia University Press.

Virginia, Mary E. (2003). Benedict, Ruth (1887–1948). DISCovering U.S. History'' online edition, Detroit: Gale.

External links

 Online video: .  Documentary about the Mead-Freeman controversy, including an interview with one of Mead's original informants.
Creative Intelligence: Female – "The Silent Revolution: Creative Man In Contemporary Society" Talk at UC Berkeley, 1962 (online audio file)
The Institute for Intercultural Studies– ethnographic institute founded by Mead, with resources relating to Mead's work
. Visited on May 15, 2014.
Library of Congress, Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
American Museum of Natural History, Margaret Mead Film & Video Festival

"Margaret Mead, 1901–1978: A Public Face of Anthropology": brief biography, Voice of America. Visited on May 15, 2014.
National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoir
The Dell Paperback Collection at the Library of Congress has first edition paperbacks of Mead's works.

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John Derek Freeman (15 August 1916 – 6 July 2001) was a New Zealand anthropologist known for his criticism of Margaret Mead's work on Samoan society, as described in her 1928 ethnography Coming of Age in Samoa. His attack "ignited controversy of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology."

Freeman initially became interested in Boasian cultural anthropology while an undergraduate in Wellington, and later went to live and work as a teacher in Samoa. After entering the New Zealand Naval Reserve in World War II, he did graduate training with British social anthropologists Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth at London School of Economics. He did two and a half years of fieldwork in Borneo studying the Iban people. His 1953 doctoral dissertation described the relations between Iban agriculture and kinship practices. Returning to Borneo in 1961 he suffered a nervous breakdown induced by an intense rivalry with ethnologist and explorer Tom Harrisson. This experience profoundly altered his view of anthropology, changing his interests to looking at the ways in which human behavior is influenced by universal psychological and biological foundations. From then on Freeman argued strongly for a new approach to anthropology which integrated insights from evolutionary theory and psychoanalysis, and he published works on the concepts of aggression and choice.

This new interest in biological and psychological universals led him to take issue with the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead who had described Samoan adolescents as not suffering from the "coming of age" crisis which was commonly thought to be universal when the study was published in 1923. Mead argued that the lack of this crisis in Samoan adolescence was caused by the youths' greater degree of sexual freedom, and that adolescence crises were therefore not universal, but culturally conditioned. In 1966-67 Freeman conducted fieldwork in Samoa, trying to find Mead's original informants, and while visiting the community where Mead had worked he experienced another breakdown. In 1983 Freeman published his book Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth in which he argued that Mead's data and conclusions were wrong and that Samoan youths suffered from the same problems as Western adolescents. He also argued that Samoan culture in fact put greater emphasis on female virginity than Western culture and had higher indices of juvenile delinquency, sexual violence and suicide. He later published The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, in which he argued that Mead's misunderstandings of Samoan culture were due to her having been hoaxed by two of her female Samoan informants, who had merely joked about sexual escapades that they did not in fact have.

Freeman's critique of Mead sparked intense debate and controversy in the discipline of anthropology, as well as in the general public. Many of Freeman's critics argued that he misrepresented Mead's views and ignored changes in Samoan society that had taken place in the period between Mead's work in 1925-1926 and his own from 1941 to 1943, including an increasing influence of Christianity. Several Samoan scholars who had been discontented with Mead's depiction of them as happy and sexually liberated thought that Freeman erred in the opposite direction. But Freeman's arguments were embraced enthusiastically among scholars who argue for the existence of genetically-hardwired universal behaviors and prefer such fields as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.The debate made Freeman a celebrity both inside and outside of anthropology, to an extent that in 1996 Freeman's life became the topic of the play Heretic written by Australian playwright David Williamson, which opened in the Sydney Opera House. The so-called Mead-Freeman controversy spanned three decades, and Freeman published his last rebuttal of a critique of his arguments only weeks before his death in 2001.

Life
Freeman was raised in Wellington by an Australian father and a New Zealand mother who had been reared in Presbyterian tradition. In particular, Freeman's mother took an active interest in his education and he maintained a close relationship with her during his adult life.

Early studies
In 1934 he entered Wellington's Victoria University College as an undergraduate and studied psychology and philosophy with Siegfried Frederick Nadel. Freeman later commented that if anthropology had been offered he would likely have chosen to study that. He also studied education and was issued a teacher's certificate in 1937. In 1938 he attended a graduate seminar taught by Ernest Beaglehole, who in turn had been a student of Edward Sapir. Beaglehole encouraged Freeman's interest in Mead's groundbreaking 1928 work, and this sparked his interest in visiting Samoa.

During his undergraduate studies in psychology he studied the socialization of children aged 6 to 9 in Wellington. This research led him to take a strong cultural determinist stance, even publishing an article in the student publication "Salient" stating that "the aims and desire which determine behavior are all constituted by the social environment". Also during this period he met Jiddu Krishnamurti who instilled in Freeman an interest in free will and choice as a counterpoint to the forces of social and cultural conditioning.

In Samoa

In 1940 Freeman's desire to travel Samoa was realized when he took a position as a schoolteacher in Samoa, from April 1940 to November 1943, during which time he learned to speak the Samoan language fluently, being qualified by a government examination. And he was adopted into a Samoan family of the community of Sa'anapu, and received the chiefly title of Logona-i-Taga. He also made archaeological field studies around the island of Upolu including the Falemauga Caves and earth mounds in Vailele village. Even though he was working as a teacher, he also had time to undertake studies of socialization in children of the same age group with which he had worked in New Zealand. Freeman also collected Samoan artefacts of material culture, which was later deposited in the Otago Museum of Dunedin, New Zealand of which he was made an honorary curator of ethnology. Having served in the Samoan defence force since 1941, in 1943, Freeman left Samoa to enlist in the Royal New Zealand Naval Volunteer Reserve. He served in Europe and the far east during the war, and in September and October 1945 while his ship was accepting the surrender of Japanese troops in Borneo, Freeman came into contact with the Iban people. This experience inspired him to return to do fieldwork in Sarawak.

Doctoral research in Borneo
In 1946 he received a Rehabilitation Bursary of the New Zealand government, he did two years of post-graduate studies with Raymond Firth at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During 1946-48 his research centered on manuscript sources relating to Samoa in the archives of the London Missionary Society. In 1947 he gave a lecture series at Oxford University on Samoan social structure, this brought him into contact with Meyer Fortes who became a significant influence on his doctoral research. In November 1948, he married Monica Maitland, and shortly after the couple left for Sarawak where Freeman would spend the next 30 months doing fieldwork among the Iban for his doctoral dissertation. In Borneo, Freeman collaborated closely with his wife, an artist, who made many ethnographic drawings of the Iban. Freeman returned to England in 1951 and was accepted into King's College at the University of Cambridge, where he completed his doctoral thesis on the Iban in 1953.

His thesis about Iban agriculture has been described as "a superb piece of research" and "one of the best and most complete accounts of swidden agriculture that has yet been made" It was pioneering in utilizing quantitative data to illuminate aspects of swidden economy as well as social organization. He also described the Iban kinship system which was remarkable in being neither patrilineal or matrilineal, but allowing either kind of filiation (but not both) for any individual. Freeman described this system as "utrolineal", and personal choice inherent in the system underpinned much of Freeman's later work.

He subsequently taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand, and the University of Samoa. In 1955, he became Senior Fellow in the Research School of Pacific Studies at Australian National University in Canberra, where he stayed until his death.

Kinship studies and changing heart
In the next decades Freeman worked on kinship, exploring especially the system of cognatic descent, in several important papers, such as Freeman (1957) and (1961). Up until this point Freeman had been trained in a framework of British social anthropology and identified strongly with American, Boasian cultural anthropology, but from 1960 he grew increasingly dissatisfied with that paradigm, partly because he felt that it left him unable to answer several important questions regarding Iban ritual behavior. Freeman later described how this dissatisfaction culminated when he read a passage in Victor Turner's "Symbols in Ndembu ritual", which questioned the ability of anthropologists to form adequate opinions about psychological aspects of ritual behavior.

Conversion and breakdown in Kuching

An important event in Freeman's life and career took place in 1961 when Freeman was sent to Borneo to attend to a graduate student, one Brian de Martinoir, who had run into trouble with locals while studying in central Borneo. The student (who was later described by Freeman as an impostor with fake credentials) had been subject to verbal abuse and humiliation by Tom Harrisson, Government Ethnologist and Curator of the Sarawak Museum, and this event had threatened his relationship with the Kajang people that he was studying. Freeman knew Harrisson, from his earlier work in Borneo in 1957 when Freeman had himself once been subject to Harrisson's fiery temper - the two men both had strong personalities and they were both strongly territorial about their research subjects.

During the stay in Kuching, Freeman developed an intense antagonism towards Harrisson, whom he believed to be a corrupting influence on the local indigenous people, and in spite of his orders from the Australian National University to leave Harrisson be, he worked intensely to put him in a bad light with the local government, and to have him forcibly removed from Borneo. Freeman seems to have believed that through erotic statues elaborated by the local Iban and working in concert with agents of the Soviet Union to subvert the British rule of Malaysia, Harrisson was exerting a form of mind control over Freeman himself as well as over the officials of Borneo. The conflict culminated when Freeman broke into Harrisson's house while he was out, and smashed a carved wooden sculpture at the Sarawak museum. Doubting his own mental health Freeman left Borneo for England intent to see a friend who was a psychiatrist, but during a stop-over in Karachi where he met with officials from London, he decided instead to return to Canberra. At Canberra Freeman was talked into seeing a psychiatrist by the university, agreeing on the condition that the topic of conversation would be Harrisson's madness and not his own mental state. When the psychiatrist Dr. Tenthowathan evaluated him as being emotionally unstable, Freeman was incredibly offended and wrote a report denouncing the doctor as an incompetent. While there were always speculations and divided opinions about Freeman's mental health among his friends and colleagues, Freeman himself rejected such speculations entirely, stating that he was in full control of himself throughout the events in Kuching.

Freeman himself described the events in Kuching as a "conversion" and an "abreaction" through which he acquired a new level of awareness, including the sudden realization that most of the basic assumptions of cultural anthropology were inadequate. From then on he adopted a new, less culturalistic and more naturalistic scientific stance, incorporating elements of ethology, primatology, neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary theory. He also changed the name under which he published; until that point he had published as J. D. Freeman, but from then on he published as Derek Freeman.

Freeman and Mead in Canberra

The events also affected Freeman's career by making the Malaysian government declare him persona non grata in Borneo, the place which had been his primary research site. Freeman then traveled to Europe to study psychoanalysis for two years. He contacted Margaret Mead, asking her to introduce him to the American psychoanalytic milieu, which she reluctantly did. Mead knew at that point that Freeman had privately criticized her work in Samoa, and also had heard of his reputation for being difficult to deal with. In November 1964 Mead visited the Australian National University and she and Freeman had their only meeting. Freeman privately presented Mead with most of the critique of her work that he would later publish after her death, and at a public meeting they had a heated discussion about the importance of female virginity in Samoan culture. During this meeting Freeman made a peculiar faux pas. When Mead asked why he had not brought his undergraduate thesis on Samoan social structure to her residence the night before, he replied "because I was afraid you might ask me to stay the night". Mead was by then more than 60 years old and walked with a cane, and the suggestion that Freeman thought Mead might seduce him caused hilarity in the auditorium. Freeman later commented that he had no idea why he said what he did, and that he was himself mortified at hearing his own words. This slip and subsequent events in Samoa, have been used to argue that Freeman's academic relationship with Margaret Mead was complicated by Freeman's emotions. Freeman later admitted that he did feel intimidated by Mead even as he was administering his harsh verbal critique of her work, and he described her as a "castrator of men" to whose power he did not want to succumb.

Back to Samoa
In December 1965, Freeman returned to Samoa, staying there the next two years. Originally his research was supposed to focus on social change, especially interactions between demographic and environmental processes, and he intended to base his research in ethological and psychoanalytic theory. However, traveling to Samoa Freeman decided that his objective should rather be to refute Mead's studies of Samoan sexuality. After working for a while in Western Samoa where he had most of his connections, he traveled to Ta‘ū in American Samoa, the location of Mead's fieldwork in the 1920s, hoping to find some of her original informants. He did not find any, but he did interview several Chiefs who had known Mead and who were highly critical of her depictions of Samoan society. He was also told that Mead had had an affair with a Samoan man, and the men he interviewed expressed outrage at her sexual licentiousness. This information deeply impacted Freeman, who later described the discovery as deeply upsetting. He concluded that when Mead described Young Samoan women as sexually liberated she was in fact projecting onto them "her own sexual experiences as a young woman in the faraway, romantic south seas". Shortly after uncovering this information Freeman suffered another breakdown, his Samoan hosts found him wandering the beach in an agitated state. Due to his "verbally violent" behavior, the coast guard was dispatched to bring him to observation at the local hospital. Samoan witnesses ascribed the incident to spirit possession, some Americans thought of it as evidence of psychological problems, but Freeman himself dismissed those speculations attributing it to fatigue from research and possible symptoms of dengue fever.

The beginnings of controversy
Back from Samoa in 1968 Freeman gave a paper criticizing Mead to the Australian Association of Social Anthropology. The paper contained many of the arguments later to be published in "Margaret Mead and Samoa": Freeman argued that Mead had been influenced by her strongly held belief in the power of culture as a determinant of human behavior, and that this belief had caused her to mischaracterize Samoa as a sexually liberated society when in fact it was characterized by sexual repression and violence and adolescent delinquency. In 1972 he published a note in the Journal of the Polynesian Society criticizing Mead's spelling of Polynesian words suggesting that her non-standard orthography betrayed a general lack of skills in the Samoan language. Completing his manuscript of Margaret Mead and Samoa in 1977 he wrote Mead offering her to read it before publication, but Mead was by then seriously ill with cancer and was unable to respond - she died the next year. Freeman sent the manuscript first to the University of Oxford Press for publication, but the editor requested several revisions which Freeman rejected. In 1982 the manuscript was accepted for publication by the Australian National University Press, which issued the work in 1983.

In 1979 Freeman also sparked a public controversy in Canberra when he protested against the Mexican government's gift of a copy of the Aztec calendar stone to the Australian National University. Freeman believed the stone to have been an altar used for human sacrifice, and therefore saw it as being inappropriate. Freeman stated that the Aztecs were "the most barbaric culture in all of human history". The event caused public debate, with commentators accusing Freeman of exhibiting a double standard as he did not speak out against a model of the Roman Colosseum on the campus, and that he had never spoken similarly out against practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism amongst the Bornean and Samoan people he had studied. The controversy created an urban legend in Australia that Freeman had either doused the stone with blood in a display of protest, or that he had planned to do so - these stories are however incorrect, and Freeman in fact calmly attended the inauguration of the stone.

Freeman vs. Mead: A self described heresy

Freeman's research on Samoa was conducted over 4 decades, and crystallized in 1981 when he was finally granted access to the archives of the High Court of American Samoa for the period of the 1920s; consequently, his refutation was published only after Mead's death in 1978. Freeman says that he informed Mead of his ongoing work in refuting her research when he met her in person in November 1964 and engaged in correspondence with her; nevertheless, he has come under fire for not publishing his work at a time when Mead could reply to his accusations. However, when Freeman died in 2001, his obituary in The New York Times pointed out that Freeman tried to publish his criticism of Mead as early as 1971, but American publishers had rejected his manuscript.  In 1978, Freeman sent a revised manuscript to Mead, but she was ill and died a few months later without responding.

The publication of Margaret Mead in Samoa: the Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth sparked an intense controversy both within anthropology and in the general public. The debate which has been characterized as being "of a scale, visibility, and ferocity never before seen in anthropology," lasted for more than a quarter of a century and has not yet died out. Dozens of articles and many monograph books have been published analyzing the arguments and the debate itself.

In the 1983 book Freeman described incongruities between Mead's published research and his observations of Samoans:

Freeman's 1983 critique asserts that Mead was tricked by native informants who were lying to her and that these misconceptions reinforced Mead's doctrine of "absolute cultural determinism" that entirely neglects the role of biology and evolution in human behavior, concentrating instead on the cultural influences. Freeman also argues that "Mead ignored violence in Samoan life, did not have a sufficient background in—or give enough emphasis to—the influence of biology on behavior, did not spend enough time in Samoa, and was not familiar enough with the Samoan language."

Freeman's refutation was initially met by some with accusations of "circumstantial evidence, selective quotation, omission of inconvenient evidence, spurious historical tracking and other critical observations," resulting in "major questions" about the validity and honesty of his scholarship. In 1996 Martin Orans examined Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress, and credits her for leaving all of her recorded data available to the general public.  Orans concludes that Freeman's basic criticisms, that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu (who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead) was wrong for several reasons: first, Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking; second, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'auma'a's account to Freeman, and third, that Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'aupa'a Fa'amu.  He therefore concludes, contrary to Freeman, that Mead was never the victim of a hoax.  Orans argues that Mead's data supports several different conclusions (Orans argues that Mead's own data portrays Samoa as more sexually restrictive than the popular image), and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture.

Freeman's obituary in The New York Times stated that "His challenge was initially greeted with disbelief or anger, but gradually won wide -- although not complete -- acceptance," but further said that "many anthropologists have agreed to disagree over the findings of one of the science's founding mothers, acknowledging both Mead's pioneering research and the fact that she may have been mistaken on details."

Soon after, The New York Times published the following response from Professor Louise Lamphere, president of the American Anthropological Association,

Your 5 Aug. obituary of the anthropologist Derek Freeman leaves the impression that the two books he wrote attacking Margaret Mead's work have permanently damaged her reputation. The Freeman debate has been the subject of a number of books and scholarly articles that support her views on the importance of culture for the adolescent experience, while criticizing some details of her research.

I have taught about the controversy for the last 18 years and am still impressed by the fact that a 24-year-old woman could produce a study so far ahead of its time. Dr. Freeman studied a different island 20 years after Mead's research, and his notion that biology is more determinative than culture is oversimplified. Most serious scholarship casts grave doubt on his data and theory.

A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct, and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.

Death
Freeman died of congestive heart failure in 2001 at the age of eighty-four. His private book collection, which has been described as one of a number of "major Canberra personal libraries", was dispersed after his death.

Selected works

Books and theses
 1953 Family and Kin among the Iban of Sarawak. University of Cambridge.
 1955  Iban agriculture; a report on the shifting cultivation of hill rice by the Iban of Sarawak, Colonial Office Research Study No. 19 (London: Her Majesty's Stationery Office)
 1970. Report on the Iban. LSE Monographs in Social Anthropology No. 41. London: Athlone Press (first published in 1955)
 1983. Margaret Mead and Samoa: The making and unmaking of an anthropological myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 
 1998. The fateful hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A historical analysis of her Samoan research. Boulder: Westview Press.

Articles and chapters
 1957. Iban pottery. Sarawak Museum Journal 8
 1957 The family system of the Iban of Borneo. In Jack Goody (ed.) The developmental cycle in domestic groups (Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology, No. 1), pp. 15–52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
 1960 The Iban of Western Borneo. In G.P. Murdock (ed.) Social structure in Southeast Asia, pp. 65–87. Chicago: Quadrangle Books.
 1961. [review of] Social Stratification in Polynesia. by Marshall D. Sahlins, Man, Vol. 61, (Aug. 1961), pp. 146–148
 1961. On the Concept of the Kindred. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Vol. 91, No. 2, 1961. pp. 192–220
 1964. Some Observations on Kinship and Political Authority in Samoa. American Anthropologist, 66: 553–568
 1965. Samoa: A Matter of Emphasis. American Anthropologist, 67: 1534–1537.
 1966. Social anthropology and the scientific study of human behaviour. Man. New Series, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Sep. 1966), pp. 330–342
 1968. Thunder, Blood, and the Nicknaming of God's Creatures. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 37:353-399
 1969. The Sea Dayaks of Borneo before White Rajah Rule. The Journal of Asian Studies
 1970. Human nature and culture. In Man and the New Biology. Australian National University Press, Canberra
 1971. Aggression: instinct or symptom? Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. Jun;5(2):66-77.
 1973. Darwinian Psychological Anthropology: A Biosocial Approach [with Comments and Reply] Current Anthropology Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 373–387
 1974. The Evolutionary Theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer [with Comments and Replies] Current Anthropology. Vol. 15, No. 3 (Sep. 1974), pp. 211–237
 1977. Studies in Borneo Societies: Social Process and Anthropological Explanation. Man.
 1980. Sociobiology: The 'antidiscipline' of anthropology. In Montagu, A. (ed.), Sociobiology Examined. Oxford University Press, New York.
 1981 Some reflections on the nature of Iban society. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific Studies, The Australian National University.
 1981. The anthropology of choice: An ANZAAS presidential address given in Auckland, New Zealand, on 24 January 1979. Canberra Anthropology 4(1): 82–100.
 1983. Inductivism and the test of truth: A rejoinder to Lowell D. Holmes and others. Canberra Anthropology 6(2): 96–192. Special Volume: Fact and Context in Ethnography: The Samoa Controversy
 1984. "O Rose thou art sick!" A Rejoinder to Weiner, Schwartz, Holmes, Shore, and Silverman. American Anthropologist, 86: 400–40
 1984. Response [to Ala'ilima, Wendt and McDowell]. Pacific Studies 7(2): 140–196.
 1985. A reply to Ember's reflections on the Freeman-Mead controversy. American Anthropologist 87(4): 910–917.
 1985. Response to Reyman and Hammond. American Anthropologist 87(2): 394–395.
 1986. Rejoinder to Patience and Smith. American Anthropologist 88(1): 162-167
 1987. Comment on Holmes's "Quest for the real Samoa". American Anthropologist 89(4): 930–935.
 1987. Review of Quest for the real Samoa: The Mead/Freeman controversy and beyond, by Lowell D. Holmes. Journal of the Polynesian Society 96(3): 392–395.
 1989. Fa’apua’a and Margaret Mead. American Anthropologist 91:1017–22.
 1989. Holmes, Mead and Samoa. American Anthropologist 91(3): 758–762.
 1991. There's tricks i' th' world: An historical analysis of the Samoan researches of Margaret Mead. Visual Anthropology Review 7(1): 103–128.
 1991. On Franz Boas and the Samoan researches of Margaret Mead. Current Anthropology 32(3): 322–330.
 1992. Paradigms in collision: The far-reaching controversy over the Samoan researches of Margaret Mead and its significance for the human sciences. Academic Questions Summer: 23–33.
 1996. Derek Freeman: Reflections of a heretic. The Evolutionist (an internet-only magazine), London School of Economics, 
 1997. Paradigms in collision: Margaret Mead's mistake and what it has done to anthropology. Skeptic 5: 66–73.
 2001. "Words have no words for words that are not true": A rejoinder to Serge Tcherkézoff. Journal of the Polynesian Society, 110(3):301-11
 2001. Paradigms in collision, in Dilthey's dream. Canberra, Australia: Pandanus

See also
Archaeology in Samoa
Heretic (play)

References

Cited works
Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth by Derek Freeman, Harvard University Press, 1983, .
"The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of her Samoan Research book review" by Grant McCall, Australian Journal of Anthropology, April 2001.
"Culture, Biology, and Evolution: The Mead–Freeman Controversy Revisited" by Paul Shankman, Journal of Youth and Adolescence, Springer Netherlands, Volume 29, Number 5 / October 2000, ISSN 0047-2891: Pages 539-556.
"Derek Freeman: 1916-2001" by Donald Tuzin, American Anthropologist, September 2002, Vol. 104, No. 3, pp. 1013–1015.
"Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture", Library of Congress, 15 February 2006.

Further reading

External links
The Register of Derek Freeman Papers 1940 - 2001 Mandeville Special Collections Library Geisel Library University of California, San Diego
 .  A 1988 documentary about the Mead-Freeman controversy, including an interview with one of Mead's original informants.

1916 births
2001 deaths
Alumni of King's College, Cambridge
Ethnographers
New Zealand anthropologists
Social anthropologists
University of Otago faculty
People from Wellington City
Historians of the Pacific
Victoria University of Wellington alumni
New Zealand expatriates in Samoa
New Zealand book and manuscript collectors
20th-century anthropologists
New Zealand expatriates in Australia
New Zealand expatriates in the United Kingdom Coming of Age in Samoa is a book by American anthropologist Margaret Mead based upon her research and study of youth – primarily adolescent girls – on the island of Ta'u in the Samoan Islands. The book details the sexual life of teenagers in Samoan society in the early 20th century, and theorizes that culture has a leading influence on psychosexual development.

First published in 1928, the book launched Mead as a pioneering researcher and as the most famous anthropologist in the world. Since its first publication, Coming of Age in Samoa was the most widely read book in the field of anthropology until Napoleon Chagnon's Yanomamö: The Fierce People overtook it. The book has sparked years of ongoing and intense debate and controversy on questions pertaining to society, culture, and science. It is a key text in the nature versus nurture debate, as well as in discussions on issues relating to family, adolescence, gender, social norms, and attitudes.

In the 1980s, Derek Freeman contested many of Mead's claims, and argued that she was hoaxed into counterfactually believing that Samoan culture had more relaxed sexual norms than Western culture. However, the anthropology community on the whole has rejected Freeman's claims, concluding that Freeman cherry-picked his data, and misrepresented both Mead's research and the interviews that he conducted.   Mead's field work for "Coming of Age" was also scrutinized, and major discrepancies found between her published statements and her field data.  Samoans themselves tend to be critical of what Mead wrote of their culture, especially her claim that adolescent promiscuity was socially acceptable in Samoa in the 1920s.

Content

Foreword
In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, writes:
"Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways."

Boas went on to point out that, at the time of publication, many Americans had begun to discuss the problems faced by young people (particularly women) as they pass through adolescence as "unavoidable periods of adjustment". Boas felt that a study of the problems faced by adolescents in another culture would be illuminating.

Introduction

Mead introduces the book with a general discussion of the problems facing adolescents in modern society and the various approaches to understanding these problems: religion, philosophy, educational theory, and psychology. She discusses various limitations in each approach and then introduces the new field of anthropology as a promising alternative science based on analyzing social structures and dynamics. She contrasts the methodology of the anthropologist with other scientific studies of behavior and the obvious reasons that controlled experiments are so much more difficult for anthropology than other sciences. For this reason her methodology is one of studying societies in their natural environment. Rather than select a culture that is fairly well understood such as Europe or America, she chooses South Sea island people because their culture is radically different from Western culture and likely to yield more useful data as a result. However, in doing so she introduces new complexity in that she must first understand and communicate to her readers the nature of South Sea culture itself rather than delve directly into issues of adolescence as she could in a more familiar culture. Once she has an understanding of Samoan culture she will delve into the specifics of how adolescent education and socialization are carried out in Samoan culture and contrast it with Western culture.

Mead described the goal of her research as follows:"I have tried to answer the question which sent me to Samoa: Are the disturbances which vex our adolescents due to the nature of adolescence itself or to the civilization?  Under different conditions does adolescence present a different picture?"

To answer this question, she conducted her study among a small group of Samoans. She found a village of 600 people on the island of Ta'ū, in which, over a period of between six and nine months, she got to know, lived with, observed, and interviewed (having learnt some Samoan) 68 young women between the ages of 9 and 20. Mead studied daily living, education, social structures and dynamics, rituals, etiquette, etc.

Samoan life and education

Mead begins with the description of a typical idyllic day in Samoa. She then describes child education, starting with the birth of children, which is celebrated with a lengthy ritual feast. After birth, however, Mead describes how children are mostly ignored, for girl children sometimes explicitly ritually ignored, after birth up to puberty. She describes the various methods of disciplining children. Most involve some sort of corporal punishment, such as hitting with hands, palm fronds, or shells. However, the punishment is mostly ritualistic and not meant to inflict serious harm. Children are expected to contribute meaningful work from a very early age. Initially, young children of both sexes help to care for infants. As the children grow older, however, the education of the boys shifts to fishing, while the girls focus more on child care. However, the concept of age for the Samoans is not the same as in the West. Samoans do not keep track of birth days, and they judge maturity not on actual number of years alive, but rather on the outward physical changes in the child.

For the adolescent girls, status is primarily a question of whom they will marry. Mead also describes adolescence and the time before marriage as the high point of a Samoan girl's life: "But the seventeen year old girl does not wish to marry – not yet. It is better to live as a girl with no responsibility, and a rich variety of experience. This is the best period of her life."

Samoan household

The next section describes the structure of a Samoan village: "a Samoan village is made up of some thirty to forty households, each of which is presided over by a head man". Each household is an extended family including widows and widowers. The household shares houses communally: each household has several houses but no members have an ownership or permanent residence of any specific building. The houses may not all be within the same part of the village.

The head man of the household has ultimate authority over the group. Mead describes how the extended family provides security and safety for Samoan children. Children are likely to be near relatives no matter where they are, and any child that is missing will be found quite rapidly. The household also provides freedom for children including girls. According to Mead, if a girl is unhappy with the particular relatives she happens to live with, she can always simply move to a different home within the same household. Mead also describes the various and fairly complex status relations which are a combination of factors such as a role in the household, the household's status within the village, the age of the individual, etc. There are also many rules of etiquette for requesting and granting favors.

Samoan social structures and rules

Mead describes the many group structures and dynamics within Samoan culture. The forming of groups is an important part of Samoan life from early childhood when young children form groups for play and mischief. There are several different kinds of possible group structures in Samoan culture. Relations flow down from chiefs and heads of households; men designate another man to be their aid and surrogate in courting rituals; men form groups for fishing and other work activities; women form groups based on tasks such as child caring and household relations. Mead describes examples of such groups and describes the complex rules that govern how they are formed and how they function. Her emphasis is on Samoan adolescent girls, but as elsewhere she needs to also describe Samoan social structures for the entire culture to give a complete picture.

Mead believes that the complex and mandatory rules that govern these various groups mean that the traditional Western concept of friendship as a bond entered into voluntarily by two people with compatible interests is all but meaningless for Samoan girls: "friendship is so patterned as to be meaningless. I once asked a young married woman if a neighbor with whom she was always upon the most uncertain and irritated terms was a friend of hers. 'Why, of course, her mother's father's father, and my father's mother's father were brothers.

The ritual requirements (such as being able to remember specifics about family relations and roles) are far greater for men than women. This also translates into significantly more responsibility being put on men than women: "a man who commits adultery with a chief's wife was beaten and banished, sometime even drowned by the outraged community, but the woman was only cast out by her husband".

Mead devotes a whole chapter to Samoan music and the role of dancing and singing in Samoan culture. She views these as significant because they violate the norms of what Samoans define as good behavior in all other activities and provide a unique outlet for Samoans to express their individuality. According to Mead there is normally no greater social failing than demonstrating an excess of pride, or as the Samoans describe it, "presuming above one's age". However, this is not the case when it comes to singing and dancing. In these activities, individuality and creativity are the most highly praised attributes, and children are free to express themselves to the fullest extent of their capabilities rather than being concerned with appropriate behavior based on age and status:

Personality, sexuality, and old age

Mead describes the psychology of the individual Samoan as being simpler, more honest, and less driven by sexual neuroses than the west. She describes Samoans as being much more comfortable with issues such as menstruation and more casual about non-monogamous sexual relations. Part of the reason for this is the extended family structure of Samoan villages. Conflicts that might result in arguments or breaks within a traditional Western family can be defused in Samoan families simply by having one of the parties to the conflict relocate to a different home that is part of the household within the village. Another reason Mead cites is that Samoans do not seem eager to give judgmental answers to questions. Mead describes how one of the things that made her research difficult was that Samoans would often answer just about every question with non-committal answers, the Samoan equivalent to shrugging one's shoulders and saying: "Who knows?"

Mead concludes the section of the book dealing with Samoan life with a description of Samoan old age. Samoan women in old age "are usually more of a power within the household than the old men. The men rule partly by the authority conferred by their titles, but their wives and sisters rule by force of personality and knowledge of human nature."

Educational problems: American and Samoan contrasts 
Mead concluded that the passage from childhood to adulthood (adolescence) in Samoa was a smooth transition and not marked by the emotional or psychological distress, anxiety, or confusion seen in the United States.

Mead concluded that this was due to the Samoan girl's belonging to a stable, monocultural society, surrounded by role models, and where nothing concerning the basic human facts of copulation, birth, bodily functions, or death, was hidden. The Samoan girl was not pressured to choose from among a variety of conflicting values, as was the American girl. Mead commented, somewhat satirically:... [an American] girl's father may be a Presbyterian, an imperialist, a vegetarian, a teetotaller, with a strong literary preference for Edmund Burke, a believer in the open shop and a high tariff, who believes that women's place is in the home, that young girls should wear corsets, not roll their stockings, not smoke, nor go riding with young men in the evening. But her mother's father may be a Low Episcopalian, a believer in high living, a strong advocate of States' Rights and the Monroe Doctrine, who reads Rabelais, likes to go to musical shows and horse races. Her aunt is an agnostic, an ardent advocate of women's rights, an internationalist who rests all her hopes on Esperanto, is devoted to Bernard Shaw, and spends her spare time in campaigns of anti-vivisection. Her elder brother, whom she admires exceedingly, has just spent two years at Oxford. He is an Anglo-Catholic, an enthusiast concerning all things medieval, writes mystical poetry, reads Chesterton, and means to devote his life to seeking for the lost secret of medieval stained glass. Her mother's younger brother ...

Reception 
On publication, the book generated a great deal of coverage both in the academic world and in the popular press. Mead's publisher (William Morrow) had lined up many endorsements from well known academics such as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and psychologist John Watson. Their praise was a major public relations coup for Morrow and drew popular attention to the book. Academic interest was soon followed by sensational headlines such as "Samoa is the Place for Women" and that Samoa is "Where Neuroses Cease".

Impact on anthropology
For most anthropologists before Mead, detailed immersive fieldwork was not a common practice. Although subsequent reviews of her work have revealed faults by the standards of modern anthropology, at the time the book was published the idea of living with native people was fairly ground breaking. The use of cross-cultural comparison to highlight issues within Western society was highly influential and contributed greatly to the heightened awareness of anthropology and ethnographic study in the United States. It established Mead as a substantial figure in American anthropology, a position she would maintain for the next fifty years.

Social influences and reactions
As Boas and Mead expected, this book upset many Westerners when it first appeared in 1928.  Many American readers felt shocked by her observation that young Samoan women deferred marriage for many years while enjoying casual sex before eventually choosing a husband. As a landmark study regarding sexual mores, the book was highly controversial and frequently came under attack on ideological grounds. For example, the National Catholic Register argued that Mead’s findings were merely a projection of her own sexual beliefs and reflected her desire to eliminate restrictions on her own sexuality. The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute listed Coming of Age in Samoa as #1 on its list of the "50 Worst Books of the Twentieth Century".

Critique of Mead's methodology and conclusions
Although Coming of Age received significant interest and praise from the academic community, Mead's research methodology also came in for criticism from several reviewers and fellow anthropologists. Mead was criticized for not separating her personal speculation and opinions from her ethnographic description of Samoan life and for making sweeping generalizations based on a relatively short period of study.

For example, Nels Anderson wrote about the book: "If it is science, the book is somewhat of a disappointment. It lacks a documental base. It is given too much to interpretation instead of description. Dr. Mead forgets too often that that she is an anthropologist and gets her own personality involved with her materials."

Shortly after Mead’s death, Derek Freeman published a book, Margaret Mead and Samoa, that claimed Mead failed to apply the scientific method and that her assertions were unsupported. This criticism is dealt with in detail in the section below.

The Mead–Freeman controversy

Freeman's 1983 book
In 1983, five years after Mead had died, Derek Freeman – a New Zealand anthropologist who lived in Samoa – published Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, in which he challenged all of Mead's major findings. In 1988, he participated in the filming of Margaret Mead and Samoa, directed by Frank Heimans, which claims to document one of Mead's original informants, now an elderly woman, swearing that the information she and her friend provided Mead when they were teenagers was false; one of the girls would say of Mead on videotape years later:

Another of Mead's statements on which Freeman focused was her claim that through the use of chicken blood, Samoan girls could and do lie about their status of virginity. Freeman pointed out that virginity of the bride is so crucial to the status of Samoan men that they have a specific ritual in which the bride's hymen is manually ruptured in public, by the groom himself or by the chief, making deception via chicken blood impossible. On this ground, Freeman argued that Mead must have based her account on (false) hearsay from non-Samoan sources.

The argument hinged on the place of the taupou system in Samoan society. According to Mead, the taupou system is one of institutionalized virginity for young women of high rank, and it is exclusive to women of high rank. According to Freeman, all Samoan women emulated the taupou system, and Mead's informants denied having engaged in casual sex as young women and claimed that they had lied to Mead.

Anthropological reception and reactions
After an initial flurry of discussion, many anthropologists concluded that Freeman systematically misrepresented Mead's views on the relationship between nature and nurture, as well as the data on Samoan culture. According to Freeman's colleague Robin Fox, Freeman "seemed to have a special place in hell reserved for Margaret Mead, for reasons not at all clear at that time".

Moreover, many field and comparative studies by anthropologists have since found that adolescence is not experienced in the same way in all societies. Systematic cross-cultural study of adolescence by Schlegel and Barry, for example, concluded that adolescents experience harmonious relations with their families in most non-industrialized societies around the world.

They find that, when family members need each other throughout their lives, independence, as expressed in adolescent rebelliousness, is minimal and counterproductive. Adolescents are likely to be rebellious only in industrialized societies practicing neolocal residence patterns (in which young adults must move their residence away from their parents). Neolocal residence patterns result from young adults living in industrial societies who move to take new jobs or in similar geographically mobile populations. Thus, Mead's analysis of adolescent conflict is upheld in the comparative literature on societies worldwide.

First, these critics have speculated that he waited until Mead died before publishing his critique so that she would not be able to respond. However, in 1978, Freeman sent a revised manuscript to Mead, but she was ill and died a few months later without responding.

Second, Freeman's critics point out that, by the time he arrived on the scene, Mead's original informants were old women, grandmothers, and had converted to Christianity, so their testimony to him may not have been accurate. They further argue that Samoan culture had changed considerably in the decades following Mead's original research; after intense missionary activity, many Samoans had come to adopt the same sexual standards as the Americans who were once so shocked by Mead's book. They suggested that such women, in this new context, were unlikely to speak frankly about their adolescent behavior. Further, they suggested that these women might not be as forthright and honest about their sexuality when speaking to an elderly man as they would have been speaking to a woman near their own age.

Some anthropologists criticized Freeman on methodological and empirical grounds. For example, they stated that Freeman had conflated publicly articulated ideals with behavioral norms – that is, while many Samoan women would admit in public that it is ideal to remain a virgin, in practice they engaged in high levels of premarital sex and boasted about their sexual affairs among themselves. Freeman's own data documented the existence of premarital sexual activity in Samoa. In a western Samoan village, he documented that 20% of 15 year-olds, 30% of 16 year-olds, and 40% of 17 year-olds had engaged in premarital sex. In 1983, the American Anthropological Association held a special session to discuss Freeman's book, to which they did not invite him. Their criticism was made formal at the 82nd annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association the next month in Chicago, where a special session, to which Freeman was not invited, was held to discuss his book. They passed a motion declaring Freeman's Margaret Mead and Samoa "poorly written, unscientific, irresponsible, and misleading". Freeman commented that "to seek to dispose of a major scientific issue by a show of hands is a striking demonstration of the way in which belief can come to dominate the thinking of scholars".

In the years that followed, anthropologists vigorously debated these issues. Two scholars who published on the issue include Appell, who stated "I found Freeman's argument to be completely convincing"; and Brady, who stated "Freeman's book discovers little but tends to reinforce what many anthropologists already suspected" regarding the adequacy of Mead's ethnography. They were supported by several others.

Much like Mead's work, Freeman's account has been challenged as being ideologically driven to support his own theoretical viewpoint (sociobiology and interactionism), as well as assigning Mead a high degree of gullibility and bias. Freeman's refutation of Samoan sexual mores has been challenged, in turn, as being based on public declarations of sexual morality, virginity, and taupou rather than on actual sexual practices within Samoan society during the period of Mead's research.

Lowell Holmes – who completed a lesser-publicized re-study – commented later: "Mead was better able to identify with, and therefore establish rapport with, adolescents and young adults on issues of sexuality than either I (at age 29, married with a wife and child) or Freeman, ten years my senior."

In 1996, Martin Orans published his review of Mead's notes preserved at the Library of Congress, crediting her for leaving all her recorded data as available to the general public. Orans concludes that Freeman's basic criticism (that Mead was duped by ceremonial virgin Fa'apua'a Fa'amu who later swore to Freeman that she had played a joke on Mead) was false for several reasons: first, Mead was well aware of the forms and frequency of Samoan joking; second, she provided a careful account of the sexual restrictions on ceremonial virgins that corresponds to Fa'apua'a Fa'amu's account to Freeman; and third, that Mead's notes make clear that she had reached her conclusions about Samoan sexuality before meeting Fa'apua'a Fa'amu. He therefore concludes, contrary to Freeman, that Mead was never the victim of a hoax.

Orans points out that Mead's data supports several different conclusions, and that Mead's conclusions hinge on an interpretive, rather than positivist, approach to culture. Orans concludes that due to Mead's interpretive approach – common to most contemporary cultural anthropology – her hypotheses and conclusions are essentially unfalsifiable and therefore "not even wrong".

Freeman's 1998 book
In 1998, Freeman published another book The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead. It included new material, in particular interviews that Freeman called of "exceptional historical significance" and "of quite fundamental importance" of one of Mead's then-adolescent informants by a Samoan chief from the National University of Samoa (in 1988 and 1993) and of her daughter (in 1995). Correspondence of 1925–1926 between Franz Boas and Margaret Mead was also newly available to Freeman. He concludes in the introduction to the book that "her exciting revelations about sexual behavior were in some cases merely the extrapolations of whispered intimacies, whereas those of greatest consequence were the results of a prankish hoax".

Freeman argues that Mead collected other evidence that contradicts her own conclusion, such as a tutor who related that as of puberty girls were always escorted by female family members. He also claims that because of a decision to take ethnological trips to Fitiuta, only eight weeks remained for her primary research into adolescent girls, and it was now "practically impossible" to find time with the sixty-six girls she was to study, because the government school had reopened. With the remaining time, she instead went to Ofu, and the bulk of her research came from speaking with her two Samoan female companions, Fa'apua'a and Fofoa. Freeman claims Mead's letters to Boas reflect that she was influenced by studies of sexuality from Marquesas Islands, and that she was seeking to confirm the same information by questioning Fa'apua'a and Fofoa. She sent her conclusions to Boas on March 14 and with "little left to do" she cut short her trip.

Freeman claimed that "no systematic, firsthand investigation of the sexual behavior of her sample of adolescent girls was ever to be undertaken. Instead, Margaret Mead's account of adolescent sexual behavior in Coming of Age in Samoa and elsewhere was based on what she had been told by Fa'apua'a and Fofoa, supplemented by other such inquiries that she had previously made." As Fa'apua'a told Freeman, in her 80s, that she and her friend had been joking, Freeman defends her testimony in the introduction of his second book about Mead: Both that the octagenarian's memory was very good, and that she swore on the Bible, as a Christian, that it was true.

In 2009, a detailed review of the controversy was published by Paul Shankman. It supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct, and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.

See also 
 Culture of Samoa
 Heretic, a play by Australian playwright David Williamson that explores Freeman's reactions to Mead.
 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia

References

Citations

Sources

External links 
 

1928 non-fiction books
Anthropology books
Samoan culture
Samoan society
Manu'a
Books about Samoa
Books by Margaret Mead
William Morrow and Company books